{"id":339,"date":"2007-09-12T05:00:24","date_gmt":"2007-09-12T13:00:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/2007\/09\/12\/are-books-irrelevant\/"},"modified":"2007-09-12T05:01:51","modified_gmt":"2007-09-12T13:01:51","slug":"are-books-irrelevant","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/webwork\/are-books-irrelevant\/","title":{"rendered":"Are books irrelevant?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> <a href=\"http:\/\/www.seobook.com\/publishers-will-have-become-artists\" title=\"seo book\" target=\"_blank\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/images\/jost-books4.jpg\" title=\"jost amman card of books\" alt=\"jost amman card of books\" align=\"left\" height=\"205\" width=\"125\" \/>Aaron Wall says books are irrelevant<\/a> &#8220;for all but true enthusiasts, desperate people seeking a manifesto for life change, or those who read as an escape.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s like that. Books and online content are not an either\/or kind of thing. Most people &#8220;surf&#8221; the web and scan pages for an items here and an item there. The web is great for that, among other things. But it&#8217;s not so good for reading a hundred thousand words in sequence.  Although there was a lot of hand wringing about a recent Associated Press-Ipsos poll that showed a quarter of Americans didn&#8217;t read a book last year, the real news is that three-quarters of Americans still read books. Historically, that&#8217;s a very high percentage. You probably know someone who read a novel or a memoir recently. Did they read it online?<\/p>\n<p>I didn&#8217;t think so.<\/p>\n<p>Books are a perfected technology. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/printing\/gutenberg.asia\/gutenberg-asia-1-introduction.htm\" title=\"early book publishing in Asia and the West\">The earliest books, much more than a millennium old, are still perfectly usable<\/a>, while your computer files from twenty-five years ago  may be useless. But I&#8217;m not here to put down the web or computer technology. It&#8217;s all good.<\/p>\n<p>The point is, it&#8217;s true <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/publishing\/publishing-glossary.htm\" title=\"tom's glossary of book publishing terminology\">the book industry<\/a> is in trouble. But the book itself is not. It&#8217;s a proven survivor. No worries.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Aaron Wall says books are irrelevant &#8220;for all but true enthusiasts, desperate people seeking a manifesto for life change, or those who read as an escape.&#8221; I don&#8217;t&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0},"categories":[35,14,3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/339"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=339"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/339\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=339"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=339"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=339"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}